Ray Kurzweil: Thinking Through the Great Change Epochs

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (born 1948) is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields as diverse as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

11 October, 2011

Ray Kurzweil: This is kind of the advanced stage of Epoch 4, where humans are creating technology and putting our knowledge base in that technology. Epoch 5 is when we’re going to merge with that non-biological intelligence we’re creating. To do that, we need to create intelligence that’s equal to us and we also need the nanotechnology to put it inside our bodies and brains. I mean, this is almost in my body and brain - it may as well be; I wouldn’t lose it that way - but that’s where we’re headed. That’ll be Epoch 5. And then Epoch 6 is when we go out into the rest of the universe.

So, I have these six epochs for really stages in the evolution of information - started out with atomic information and then chemical information, biological information, then information in brains of organisms, then technology, and finally we will merge our intelligence into the technology and take advantage of what I call the "law of accelerating returns," which is the fact that information technology grows exponentially. That's the force that's behind what’s referred to as the singularity.

Directed / Produced byJonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Ray Kurzweil has developed six epochs for stages in the evolution of information.